Autonomously learning one-to-many social interaction logic from human-human interaction data

Abstract

We envision a future where service robots autonomously learn how to interact with humans directly from human-human interaction data, without any manual intervention. In this paper, we present a data-driven pipeline that: (1) takes in low-level data of a human shopkeeper interacting with multiple customers (28 hours of collected data); (2) autonomously extracts high-level actions from that data; and (3) learns-without manual intervention-how a robotic shopkeeper should respond to customers' actions online. Our proposed system for learning the interaction logic uses neural networks to first learn which customer actions are important to respond to and then learn how the shopkeeper should respond to those important customer actions. We present a novel technique for learning which customer actions are important by first learning the hidden causal relationship between customer and shopkeeper actions. In an offline evaluation, we show that our proposed technique significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, in both which customer actions are important and how to respond to them.